He's home now, resting, and getting back into the swing of 'being retired'.

The surgery was a success, they removed 5% of one of his kidneys, and completely removed the tumor. There will be no chemo and nothing else besides standard followups to make sure he's healing.

Praise God that his back was hurting him enough to get him to go in for xrays. They never figured out what the back pain was, but by the grace of God they found the tumor, tiny and easily cut out before it caused any real damage.

Glad to have my old man still around. I may be a father of 2 myself, but there's always something he can teach me.

Today on Twitter, someone I followed retweeted something about how conservative Christians actually get pleasure from people suffering. I called her out on this and her response was that if it pissed me off, maybe it was because it was true.

I don’t like Trump, thus I’m despised by people I used to fight side by side against the creeping state because hey, they now have the pen & phone and dammit, they’re going to use it and my principles means I hate America & am a commie bitch.

I have no problems with people opening up their homes and accepting refugees who are fleeing oppression. I’m not as much of a fan of me being forced to open *my* wallet to do so, but this means that I don’t care about kids dying. I mention there are people near by that I’d prefer to take care of instead, and I’m called a white-nationalist. Racist. Xenophobe. Whatever the insult du jour is.

Mention that I’m ok with people of any color, religion, background, foreground, downtown, uptown, whatever – owning firearms to defend themselves and I’m a cross between Satan and Hitler since I want to see people of some color, religion, or background killed or something.

Not kidding, this morning I opened my favorite “bathroom time” game, Two Dots, to entertain myself while I dropped off a Wookiee at the Cantina, and the splash screen was a political message about the falsely-named #muslimban.

I deleted it immediately.

It’s not logical. It’s not rational.

And dammit… it’s not healthy. I don’t enjoy it any more. I can’t even log into the Bookface thing to post pictures of my woodworking or my kids without being pummeled by political shit-tossing.

I’m this close to just shutting it all down. Quit Twitter. Mute everyone on FB. Stop reading blogs.

As you all (the 6 or 7 of you who still read me, that is) know, I’ve gotten into woodworking recently. It’s been something I’ve always wanted to do and now that I have a house with an actual workshop in the back, I’ve been able to fulfill that dream.

Now that I have a lathe, I can turn objects and some of those happen to be pens. My girls & I made a few pens over the past few days and of course I showed them off on Twitter and Facebook.

Then the orders started coming in.

I wasn’t expecting that, but I enjoy making them and so I’m going to open up the offer here as well as I’d like to get as many orders in place as I can before I start buying more materials. Bulk is costly up front, but cheaper in the long run. Unless you don’t use it all, then… well… My plan is to put up the basic price sheet here and hopefully generate a few more orders before I start.

So, take a look at the pens here. All these pens were slimline style, black ink, twist-operation with gunmetal hardware. The ink is standard cartridges like you find here. I can, of course, get any other colors of hardware like brass, silver, titanium, etc. (some at an extra cost. Rhodium for example!)

From left to right

The first pen was mostly turned by my eldest daughter. We picked a random blank of wood and it turned out amazing. It’s the most basic pen and it runs $25.

The second pen is purpleheart with a maple/wenge laminate stripe. I can do laminate stripes of all sorts of woods & colors. Multiple bands can be added to a pen – $30

The third one is an exotic. This one happens to be snakewood and is one of the more expensive woods you will find. These would run $35-$40 (starting) depending on the wood. I can do amazing burl wood pens, but sometimes those blanks, like Amboyna Burl, can run $80. They’re drop-dead sexy though.

Finally, I have a serpentine pen. Serpentines are created by cutting up a blank, adding in thin veneers, then gluing them back together. They start like this

And end up like the pen you see on the right. You’re never really 100% sure what you’re going to get when the pen is turn, but it comes out as awesome swirls. I’m going to attempt different angles and thicknesses too. These requires a lot of work as it’s a minimum of 4 cut & glue-ups as well as cutting the veneers from the stock I have. These are $50, but are unique as all get out.

I’m also thinking about doing a limited edition (aka too much work to do all the time) Pen, Pencil, and 1911 Grip set, all from the same billet of wood, which would make a really, really nifty set. I’ve not thought of a price on that yet but if there’s interest, I can put that in the hopper.

If you’re interested in any of these pens or have questions, please email me at robb at robballen.com.

That’s a Nova Comet II Midi Lathe. 12” swing, 16” bed extendable to 42” which means I can make everything from pens to baseball bats. A mid sized lathe in a mini sized footprint. Sucker is heavy at ~80# and absolutely the quietest power tool in the shop. Variable speed via a dial, plus 3 pulley combinations for extra speed / torque.

I got it from Bowls for Good, a fantastic organization in St. Petersburg that gets returned & broken lathes from Nova, refurbishes them, then uses the proceeds from their sales to help feed people in St. Pete as well as providing lessons for disadvantaged youths so that they have a chance at having a skill in life.

The one I got was practically flawless straight out of the box. It was a return, but there was nothing wrong with it at all. $200 for a $500 lathe and all of that goes towards a fantastic cause.

Is how you discover you have the ability to leap over a car hood even though you’re physically tired.

At this point, I’m still not convinced the SOB wasn’t actively trying to run me down. I was at an intersection, trying to cross. Idiot Driver was turning right, but stopped for long enough that I assumed he was letting me cross. As soon as I got in front of where he’d be turning, he took off.

I managed to leap up, putting my hand on his hood to vault over and landed on my feet.

Idiot Driver never stopped.

I’m fine. Didn’t hurt me in the slightest. I didn’t even twist my shoulder or hurt my wrist. But I’m buying an LED running vest because that was scary as hell.

Friday night I got home and noticed some slow down of the interweb tubing. It wasn’t terrible, but definitely wasn’t what I was paying for. Often this is just network congestion so I gave it some time. Went to dinner & came back.

Suddenly, the tubing was clogged completely.

I couldn’t pull up any websites. It wasn’t 100% down, more like 99.43% and here and there something would trickle across. I had to tether my iPad to my cell phone so I could hop on chat with a tech. Weirdest things – pings had 0% loss. ICMP worked just peachy. Regular TCP or anything else didn’t.

The switch part of the router was working fine. Every computer / printer / device inside could see the others with no issue, even HTTP.

By the way, when you talk to internet support and tell them you’re running Wireshark & seeing TCP packets get dropped after multiple Keep Alive requests, they automatically send you to someone who knows what they’re doing.

The tech couldn’t figure anything out. Said he’d send someone out on Monday.

Dammit.

I was 90% sure the router was going bad. I was having a hard time connecting to it to change the settings, so on Saturday morning, I went to the WalMart of computer stores – Best Buy – and picked up a new router.

Got home, plugged in the new router, and using my iPad I went online to see how the setup was supposed to work since it didn’t have a manual. 5 minutes of reading I suddenly realized I hadn’t turned on tethering. iPad was using the house wireless to browse the web.

Everything was working.

*sigh*

No idea what happened or why. I took the other router back, got a full refund, and now everything is fine. I don’t like not knowing what happened because now I don’t know if my router is wonky or if it was just something on Fios’ end.